Mammoth

Or some such bullshit.

Howard, who was no math slouch, could not follow all the man's equations, but that was what he was being paid for. Obfuscation, smoke and mirrors, intended to make the ordinary viewer, simple congressperson, or even educated layman drop his jaw and say... duuuuuh, okay, if you say so.

Knowing the public would never be completely comfortable with an explanation like that, Howard's PR firm suggested how the whole bucket of lemons could be sweetened a bit, and so a second expert was hired. This one was a well-known populizer of science with the stature and stage presence of the late, great Isaac Asimov but without Asimov's scruples. That worthy came up with the following analogy:

Ouch!

Well, yeah... but why didn't the same thing happen when Big Mama and Fuzzy and the corpse of Big Daddy were removed? Easy. What happens if you don't reach for that doorknob? What if you wait a minute or two before trying to open the door? Why, the static charge bleeds off into the air.

Viola!

This was all said with such conviction, reasonableness, and aplomb that even Howard almost found himself ready to believe it. And the public and the investigatory boards, knowing that there was a solid basis of mathematical gobbledygook underlying this rampant flummery, accepted it, too.

The biggest reason everyone, scientist and layman alike, pretty much had to accept Howard's version of events was that there was absolutely no proof that it was wrong. Other than to reveal that time travel had been accomplished, that a time machine existed, Howard had revealed a sum total of... nothing.

He knew there were those who viewed his exploding mammoth hypothesis as the sheer claptrap that it was. There were alternative explanations, of course, some of them wacky enough to make amusing reading, most just stupid. The Internet was rife with websites claiming to have the straight dope on that fateful night, from UFOs to communists to vast conspiracies of animal-hating capitalists to the Wrath of God Himself. There were even a few that got it right, but who was listening? They all faded into that vast babble of nuts that everyone was so used to by now, the online riffraff, the crazies with an ax to grind who drowned each other out in their relentless paranoia.

Then there were the handful of people capable of following the highest of higher mathematics, who knew that a few decimal points had been dropped, a few numbers divided by zero, a few Riema

Better yet, even many of those who could spot the bad shuffle simply assumed it was deliberate disinformation given out not to cover up anything Howard had done, but to conceal what he knew. So what if somebody had his thumb on the scales of the equations submitted publicly? The incontrovertible fact was that time travel had happened, that human beings had gone back in time and returned to the present day with living—and dead—proof that they had been there.

How they had done it was proprietary, far too closely held even to risk applying for a patent. Howard was assumed to be protecting his interests until he had everything sewed up, until he had figured out how to squeeze every dollar out of this revolutionary new technology, until every conceivable piece of it and application for it was wholly owned by Mr. Howard Christian. In short, he was doing exactly what they would have done if they had discovered time travel. And nobody could do a damn thing about it.

He didn't have a clue how to make a time machine.

It was enough to make a billionaire weep.

"Howard, darling, it's getting late."

Just like that, all thought of time machines and defeats and that bastard Matthew Wright and that ungrateful bitch Susan Morgan fled from Howard's mind. He turned, smiling, and drank in the face of Andrea de la Terre.

Andrea de la Terre, head of Terra Firma, the conservation group she had founded and nurtured into a force to rival the Cousteau Society or Friends of Nature. Terra Firma was heartily disliked by the semi-radical groups, who sometimes viewed her as wishy-washy—Andrea was not a vegetarian, for instance—but they had to deal with her because she got things done and she knew everybody. Everybody that counted, that is, which is to say all the "green" stars in Hollywood and the music business. A dozen phone calls from her could bring out more star power to a rally, and more money into organizational coffers, than a year of hard work by any lobbying group other than the NRA.

Andrea de la Terre, until recently the very definition of Hollywood Liberal, who had turned down a multimillion-dollar cosmetics endorsement over the issue of animal testing, and prevailed in a brand-libel suit brought against her when she publicly burned boxes of eyeliner, lipstick, and rouge. Andrea de la Terre, the former Melba Horowitz of Queens, New York City. Top female box office draw for the last three years, maker of politically and environmentally responsible epics that also made pots of money, much of it for Howard Christian's studio.

Howard had never actually met her until two years ago. He did not mix with movie stars, even when they worked for him. They had ended up facing each other across a long conference table where he had sat down with groups opposed to Cenozoic Park in an attempt to iron out their differences. That was Andrea's stated intent, anyway. Howard viewed it as a wasted afternoon. He had intended to sit politely and smile politely and nod politely, and then go back to doing exactly what he had been doing before. The nerve of the woman, she and her bigshot famous Hollywood idiot friends, people with perfect teeth and skin and chiseled features, the very guys who had hammered him in the playground from the time he was five, the very girls who had sneered openly at his shitty clothes, his big ears, his zits, his stammer. Screw them all.

Until Andrea de la Terre opened her mouth and spoke, and then he was lost. ANDREA had brought grapes.

Let's don't get into that, Howard thought.

She stood there, every man's fantasy, every woman's unattainable ideal, and Howard marveled again at a thought he would never express to her: she was not really beautiful. She was attractive, no question about it, and no single part of her face was anywhere near grotesque... it's just that the parts were not assembled in a way that would normally qualify a girl as gorgeous. Howard was reminded of Judy Garland, or of Barbra Streisand, though Andrea looked nothing like either of them. If she was sitting in a bus station or on a stool at Schrafft's you'd walk right by her.

But in the same way that, when Streisand began to sing, you forgot all about the nose and she became the most wonderful thing in the universe, when Andrea looked at you, when she spoke, when she moved... you were lost. From the moment she started talking, Howard would have given her anything she wanted. (Lucky for him, she never realized that, but he did concede half a dozen points he had not intended to budge on.)

Howard was in love.

He had never expected to be, not at his age, not at this point in his life. He had had the usual crushes on the prettiest girls in school, those times when he had been in school and not self-educating in an anonymous trailer park or a juvenile hall in one state or another. They were purely sexual attractions, since he had seldom exchanged so much as two words with any of those prom queens and cheerleaders. That had lasted right on through college. Then he was working, inventing, devoting himself to his computers, and there was no time for romance, even in the event he believed any of the engineering majors he met in the pathetic thing he called a social life would respond to him.